The Eye of Argon

A barbarian turns up in a medieval tavern, gets into a fight with the locals, things turn bad etc.

This book has a weird history. It was written in 1970 by 16 year old Jim, who was a member of a zine club in his town. The zine was a stapled together collection of writings from members and produced on those old wax masters that we'd type on. The master was put onto the belt of the duplicator and the machine wound by hand. The technology of the day. The writing was all over the place with Jim using fancy words, often spelled badly and used incorrectly for the context.

The editor of the zine sent a copy to a zine friend in another city, not realising that the back page had come adrift from the staples. That guy read some of it at a zine conference, people fell about laughing, especially as the story had no ending page. So they passed the zine around the circle, each person reading until they started laughing, then the next person etc. Over the years it got copied and copied (still no last page) and became a zine conference comedy thing to read it like this. It got tagged with 'Is this the worst fantasy story ever written?'

Jim heard about it and was upset that he was being mocked for something he'd written as a youngster and said he'd never write anything ever again. Jim died in his forties. Then somebody found an original copy of the zine with the back page intact. Over time the story found its way onto websites for downloading. Taff.org.uk has the full ebook with notes on its history.

I feel for Jim. Had his original story received some simple editing before circulating as it did it would not have been the subject of ridicule that it became. And perhaps Jim could have written more.